The Magic Circle

johnny_ultimate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzxm4WtVUt0

Anybody else playing this? It's definitely the sort of game you want to talk about!

Designed by Bioshock / Thief: Deadly Shadow / etc... veterans Stephen Alexander and Jordan Thomas, The Magic Circle is a game about games. You've heard that one before, I'm sure, but fair to say this one dives a little deeper, and asks you to too.

As a commentary on games - and it encompasses everything from design to development to the players to the marketing to video streaming to modding - it can be both impressively sharp and totally maddening, sometimes within close succession. It throws a lot of stuff at the player, and while some of its critiques fall flat, others hit their mark with scathing precision. It definitely provides much food for thought over the course of its running time, waltzing between cynical and affectionate criticism from scene to scene. There's also a debate to be had over whether it falls victims to some of the same things it seems to bemoan - it has a tricky relationship with the concept of 'story' for example, culminating in overlong, on-the-nose cutscenes that nonetheless could easily be perceived as a pointed satire of overlong, on-the-nose cutscenes (and QTEs... and player's attention spans... and authorial delusion... and ludonarrative dissonance).

We've had 'meta' games before, but where The Magic Circle departs somewhat is in what it allows the player to do. While there's some surprises in that sense, the 'core' of the gameplay takes the form of a small open world - representing a game stuck in development hell - where the player can hack and reprogramme the various creatures and items that occupy it (similar to Hack 'n' Slash). This offers plenty of delightful opportunities - by the end I was accessing previously unreachable areas of the map by casually pointing to landmarks while standing on the back of my flying tortoise, while an army of firebreathing, robotic, shielded minions only needed a trigger push to be conjured. There's room, then, for player imagination, although also an argument to be made that it's a bit limited in execution. Still, it's a bold and often delightful way of actually exploring the themes of the overarching story, and as said there's some playful twists on the whole idea of player agency in the later chapters of the game. If one could suggest the likes of Bioshock and The Stanley Parable comment on games without ultimately trying to do a whole lot about the same conventions they skewer, it's not an accusation that could be levelled at The Magic Circle, with the designers even going out of their way to actively embrace and indulge in some of the impossibilities and contradictions they highlight.

The Magic Circle, like the game within the game, doesn't really come close to totally working. It's a mess, with half-baked ideas and sometimes clunky execution. Other times it's about as provocative, entertaining and illuminating a game as you'll play this year. So yeah, curious to hear some other responses to it. There is, I believe, a generous free demo available.